Canonical Might Drop the Weather Indicator from Ubuntu 13.04

There's an ongoing debate about the problems of this applet

Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) is just around the corner, but the developers have found out that the weather indicator is broken.

A developer from Canonical has noticed that the weather indicator is the number one source of bug reporting on Launchpad. The most common problem is the fact that users can add a new location to the list.

“The problem is that the code uses a service which has been discontinued by Yahoo [1]. The services returns a 404 error nowadays, which means adding a location can't work.

“There is another service in place to get a woeid (location code number) from a city name, but somebody would need to register for an appid key and port the code to it (I guess the porting should be alright),” stated Canonical's Sebastien Bacher on Launchpad.

A few developers have volunteered to help fix the problems with this indicator, but it seem that it could be more trouble than it's worth.

“Seeing the number of reports on errors.ubuntu.com, quite some users try to installed [sic] it and ran into the breakage, I think it's less confusing to just not mark as available something that can't be used in ‘normal condition’,” said Sebastien Bacher.

Another suggestion was to use libgweather as the backend for the applet, especially because this particular package just received an update with the GNOME 3.8.1 release.

“If it's totally broke, let's drop it and backport it if/when it gets fixed. A backport will appear in software center just like something in the main archive if there's no archive version for it AIUI (apt certainly treats it that way since backports are enabled by default, but pinned lower),” Canonical's Micah Gersten also said.

All in all, the future of the weather indicator doesn't look too bright. We'll keep you informed if anything changes by the time of the official Ubuntu 13.04 release.